•  19
    The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique
    University of California Press. 1984.
    This study is a philosophical critique of the foundations of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis. As such, it also takes cognizance of his claim that psychoanalysis has the credentials of a natural science. It shows that the reasoning on which Freud rested the major hypotheses of his edifice was fundamentally flawed, even if the probity of the clinical observations he adduced were not in question. Moreover, far from deserving to be taken at face value, clinical data from the psychoanalytic treatment …Read more
  •  7
    Adolf Grünbaum is one of the giants of 20th century philosophy of science. This volume is the first of three collecting his most essential and highly influential work. The essays collected in this first volume focus on three related areas. They discuss scientific rationality-the problem of what it takes for a theory to be called scientific, and ask whether it is plausible to draw a clear distinction between science and non-science as was famously proposed by Karl Popper. They delve into the deba…Read more
  •  33
    Geometrodynamics and ontology
    Journal of Philosophy 70 (21): 775-800. 1973.
  •  156
    Is Simplicity Evidence of Truth?
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 61 261-275. 2007.
    In a short 1997 book entitled Simplicity as Evidence of Truth, the Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne has put forward the following thesis summarily: ‘… for theories (of equal scope) rendering equally probable our observational data (which, for brevity I shall call equally good at “predicting”), fitting equally well with background knowledge, the simplest is most probably true’.
  •  35
    Does Freudian Theory Resolve “The Paradoxes of Irrationality”?
    The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 9 203-218. 2000.
    In this paper, I criticize the claim made by Donald Davidson, among others, that Freud’s psychoanalytic theory provides “a conceptual framework within which to describe and understand irrationality.” Further, I defend my epistemological strictures on the explanatory and therapeutic foundations of the psychoanalytic enterprise against the efforts of Davidson, Marcia Cavell, Thomas Nagel, et al., to undermine them.
  •  26
    Atheismus, Induktivismus und Freud oder: die Vertreibung eines Kölschen Jungen
    with Hans-Peter Krüger
    Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 42 (3): 473-497. 1994.
  • God and the Holocaust
    Free Inquiry 8 (1): 23-25. 1987.
  •  29
    Relativity, Causality and Weiss's Theory of Relations
    Review of Metaphysics 7 (1). 1953.
    MR. WEISS'S recent article "The Contemporary World" is an attempt to outline nothing short of a general theory of the logic and ontology of relations. The theory of relativity avowedly has a far more narrow scope. The issue raised by Mr. Weiss's critique of the theory of relativity is therefore not whether that theory is an adequate general metaphysics of relations. What is at issue, however, is the philosophical adequacy of the relativistic assertions concerning the distinctly temporal and caus…Read more
  •  20
    E. A. Milne's scales of time
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 4 (16): 329-331. 1953.
  •  10
    Modern Science and Zeno's Paradoxes of Motion
    In Wesley Charles Salmon (ed.), Zeno’s Paradoxes, Bobbs-merrill. pp. 200--250. 1970.
  •  31
    Wesley C. Salmon, 1925-2001
    Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 75 (2). 2001.
  •  15
    Can a Theory Answer more Questions than one of its Rivals?
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 27 (1): 1-23. 1976.
  •  2
  •  15
    A New Critique Of Theological Interpretations Of Physical Cosmology
    Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook 8 269-288. 2001.
    This paper is a sequel to my “Theological Misinterpretations of Current Physical Cosmology”. It draws on portions of my earlier but goes beyond it and modifies the overlapping portions.
  •  93
    The Duhemian Argument
    Philosophy of Science 27 (1). 1960.
    This paper offers a refutation of P. Duhem's thesis that the falsifiability of an isolated empirical hypothesis H as an explanans is unavoidably inconclusive. Its central contentions are the following: 1. No general features of the logic of falsifiability can assure, for every isolated empirical hypothesis H and independently of the domain to which it pertains, that H can always be preserved as an explanans of any empirical findings O whatever by some modification of the auxiliary assumptions A …Read more
  •  47
    Narlikar's "creation" of the big Bang universe was a mere origination
    Philosophy of Science 60 (4): 638-646. 1993.
    In Grunbaum (1989, 374, 390), I objected to Narlikar's (1977, 136-137) designation "event of 'creation'" for a supposed first cosmic instant t = 0, which he imports into the big bang cosmology of the general theory of relativity (GTR). Narlikar (1992, 361-362) does reject a theological construal of the "creation". But, endeavoring to justify his secular creationism, he now points out that, in the GTR, the usual derivation of matter-energy conservation from Hilbert's stationary action principle c…Read more
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    Using Grunbaum 1984 and 1993 as a springboard, Greenwood (this issue) claims to have offered several methodologically salubrious and exegetically illuminating theses on empirical evaluations of theoretical explanations of psychotherapeutic efficacy. According to his exegesis of Grunbaum's construction (1984, Ch. 2, Section C; 1993, 184-204) of Freud's "Tally Argument," that argument bespeaks a rife neglect of the epistemologically-significant distinction between empirical evaluations of the effi…Read more
  •  119
  •  74
    Précis of The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9 (2): 217-228. 1986.
    This book critically examines Freud's own detailed arguments for his major explanatory and therapeutic principles, the current neorevisionist versions of psychoanalysis, and the hermeneuticists' reconstruction of Freud's theory and therapy as an alternative to what they claim was a “scientistic” misconstrual of the psychoanalytic enterprise. The clinical case for Freud's cornerstone theory of repression – the claim that psychic conflict plays a causal role in producing neuroses, dreams, and bung…Read more